Hi, I am David

Senior Backend Engineer and Team Lead

I’m David Hamber, based in Berlin, Germany. This site serves as a resource for my professional experience, personal projects, and current interests.

In my recent years, I have worked as a Team Lead, focusing on mentoring mid-level engineers and elevating team competency in object-oriented programming and general development best practices.

My experience working closely with DevOps teams includes robust proficiency across AWS systems, coupled with containerization and CI/CD tools such as Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, New Relic, and GitLab.

My journey started in 2004, following my BSc in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. I began my career in the UK as a junior programmer for an Indie Games company specializing in Virtual Worlds and MMO games. My early roles were highly varied, encompassing tools programming, web development, system administration, and eventually leading the network server programming efforts.

In 2014, I relocated to Berlin, where I have focused primarily on backend API engineering. Over the years, I have gained deep familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and major CI/CD platforms, and have established a strong record of improving architectural design. This includes refactoring legacy systems and developing robust payment solutions that handle various transaction types (credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay).

David Hamber

Curriculum Vitae

	Professional Experience


Jan 2024–Jul 2025	Lead Software Engineer (Senior+ Engineer), Hexaware Technologies, Berlin. Refactored and optimised existing microservices for a major online dating platform, significantly enhancing system scalability and reliability. Provided 24/7 on-call support and incident response. Guided the production environment transition to Kubernetes by collaborating with DevOps, significantly modernised the deployment pipeline and enhancing overall system resilience. Provided technical leadership and mentorship to the Product and App Support teams, establishing and enforcing adherence to robust coding standards and best practices across the backend. Operated within professional Agile frameworks, utilising Scrum, GitLab, and Jira for project management and deployment.
Sep 2020–Dec 2023	Lead Software Engineer, Spark Networks SE, Berlin. Developed and maintained critical payment features for the Zoosk dating platform, managing the payment service integration for major providers including credit card gateways, iTunes, PayPal, and Google Play. Led the architectural refactoring of the payment service to adhere to Hexagon Design Architecture, resulting in clearer separation of concerns and enhanced maintainability. Managed the end-to-end implementation of complex backend payment logic, ensuring security, reliability, and high transaction throughput.
Jan 2020–July 2020	Software Entwickler (Senior), allmyhomes GmbH, Berlin. Developed REST API microservices using PHP for a property platform that connects new build developers, brokers, and agents with end property purchasers, specialising in branding and lead generation solutions. Assisted the migration of microservices from basic API calls to a robust CQRS Event Sourcing system, operating within a Domain Driven Design (DDD) environment. Defined and enforced consistent API contracts using OpenAPI 2 (Swagger), ensuring seamless integration between front-end and backend microservices deployed via Docker and orchestrated through Kubernetes. Worked within Agile/Scrum processes, utilising Event Storming for process mapping, and ensuring code quality by working within Continuous Integration (CI) using GitLab and Jira.
Jan 2017–Jan 2019	Senior Software Engineer, Dunnhumby Germany GmbH (formerly Sociomantic Labs GmbH), Berlin. Development and maintenance of a RPC API in PHP, serving web and mobile front-ends, within a company that offers real time bidding for online advertising solutions. Refactoring legacy code, adhering to SOLID OOP design principles, clearly identifying dependencies.
Sep 2004–Mar 2014	Server Programmer / Lead Server Programmer, RedBedlam Ltd, Brighton, United Kingdom. Developed and maintained the entire back-end code for a contiguous, persistent virtual world (MMO game) server, requiring deep understanding of real-time networking and scalable architecture. Engineered dynamic server instances utilising Interprocess Communication (IPC) and custom application layer protocols to support thousands of interactions. Improved system efficiency by optimising databases, resolving complex bottlenecks, and developing new game mechanics, features, and bug fixes. Managed full deployment infrastructure, including the administration and installation of FreeBSD Unix and Debian Linux servers for both game and web services.
	Education & Professional Development


Jan 2026 – Jun 2026	TELC B2 German Course, (Currently Participating) Expected completion: End of June 2026
Jun 2019-Sep 2019	TELC B1 German Course, Full-time
Oct 2000-Jun 2003	BSc Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Sussex, United Kingdom.
	Language Skills


English	Native Speaker	Comprehensive native level of understanding.
German	B1	Rating: Good.

Technologies

Companies and Projects

Hexaware

Hexaware took the role of managing ongoing development of Spark Network’s online dating platforms in 2024. During this time I continued to work on Spark’s Zoosk platform. I became the Team Lead for the product engineering and product support backend teams responsible for the whole Zoosk backend.

Spark networks

Spark Networks are an online dating business that own several well known online dating platforms including Christian Mingles, JDate, SilverSingles, EliteSingles, eDarling and Zoosk – the platform that I worked on. Zoosk was purchased by Spark around 2019. I started on the payment services team, dealing with payments using Google Play, Apple, PayPal and Adyen for credit cards. I eventually switching to a Team Lead position.

all my homes

allmyhomes provided marketing solutions for new-build real estate. It integrated marketing and sales activities on a software platform that gave the developer all the information and control over the project in order to make its sales. I worked on their event stream based REST API that was implemented with domain driven design.

Sociomantic

Sociomantic Labs was a German company, that specialized in the Real-time Bidding area for e-commerce. The company helped online stores to generate additional sales using an intellectual and scalable management system for media advertising. During my time with Sociomantic Labs I helped maintain and improve the API layer of their real-time bidding systems. Sociomantic was purchased and integrated into the British corporation Dunnhumby under the name Dunnhumby Germany.

RedBedlam

The following projects were during my time at RedBedlam 2004 – 2014

Roma Victor

In 2004, the year after leaving University I joined RedBedlam Ltd, a fledgling start up company. The company had an international team of people working from the United States, Spain, France, whilst the majority were based in Brighton within the United Kingdom.

Roma Victor was a particularly ambitious project. The game was a Roman Empire M.M.O.G. / Virtual World set in 180 A.D. within a 30km x 30km area along Hadrian’s Wall in Northern England.

After a few months of building a Content Management System for the game’s art assets and object hierarchy, I took a basic prototype of the server code and ported it from Visual Basic 6 to PHP. Over the period of development I dramatically improved upon the original design and implementation, adding new features, bug fixing and improving the base network code. The configuration consisted of three different kinds of software server: The main authentication and world manager server, the zone server instances, and a tray server for starting individual zone server instances.

dPals

Proving the versatility of the server code base that had been built whilst Roma Victor had been developed, it was simple to reduce the complexity for the back-end of dPals. dPals was a web based children’s virtual world, made by RedBedlam on behalf of History and Heraldry, a market leader in impulse-buy gifts and merchandise.

The first iteration of dPals used a Flash based front-end that connected to a branched version of the Roma Victor Zone Bubble code. The Roma Victor game code that sat on top of the underlying Zone Bubble base was stripped out and replaced a simpler and child friendly dPals game code. It was straight forward to alter the co-ordinate system from 3D to 2D to match dPals’ 2D Parallax scrolling world.

I was able to delegate responsibility for the Content Management System to a new programmer who was able to improve it under my direction.

Later in the project’s life the front end was rebuild in HTML5 and I was able to delegate the server code development to another new programmer who was brought in to support my role.

The Missing Ink

Learning from the experience of Roma Victor’s development, The Missing Ink followed not long after. The Missing Ink had a deliberately simple but polished 2D character artwork style set within a 3D world so that the content could be rapidly produced.

The Missing Ink was a “back to basics” M.M.O. game, that had classic M.M.O. style combat and leveling unlike Roma Victor’s twitch base combat and skill based system. It was intended to appeal to a wider market.

I had completely rewritten the server code ground up for this project. Substantial changes were required to allow for the fact that there would be a higher concentration of players within the same bubble zone area. As a result, the contiguous topography that was used in Roma Victor was replaced with a shard based system.

It was during the development of The Missing Ink that I shifted the code base away from PHP to Mono C#, matching the client side code development that was using Mono C# that was within the Unity 3D engine.

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